Believability Is the Road to National Ruin

In 1998, a Russian geopolitical analyst named Igor Panarin forecast that the United States would disintegrate by the year 2010. Watching Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, it occurred to me that maybe he was off by just a few years.

Panarin argued that the U.S. would be brought low by a combination of mass immigration, mounting foreign debt, ethnic unrest and class conflict, leading to the disunification of the country into a “Texas Republic,” a “Californian Republic” and so on.

But that’s not always how countries tear themselves to pieces. Sometimes, they destroy themselves over the things they don’t see, not the things they do. Chief among those unseen things is belief.

Do you believe Blasey? I watched her — vulnerable, obliging, guileless (precisely the opposite of what her skeptics suspected) — and found her wholly believable. If she’s lying, she will face social and professional ruin. Do you believe Kavanaugh? I watched him — meticulous, wounded, furious (wouldn’t you be, too, if you were innocent of such an accusation?) — and found him wholly believable. If he’s lying, he will face ruin as well.

I found her likable; him, not so much. But likability is not what this is about.

Bottom line, I came away from the hearings feeling no more confident than I had the day before of who was being truthful. It was high drama but it was also a wash. What happened Thursday should not prevent Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Senators are within their rights to vote against the nomination out of philosophical differences. But to vote on the basis of a belief in things unseen and unproved is a road to national ruin.

What’s the alternative? Democrats demanded an F.B.I. investigation at Thursday’s hearing and now, thanks to Jeff Flake, they’ve been joined by Senate Republicans. I’m all for it, though I doubt it will uncover anything definitive. It could have been completed, with much greater thoroughness, weeks ago if Dianne Feinstein hadn’t concealed Blasey’s allegation from the Judiciary Committee for much of the summer — a remarkably cynical ploy suggesting motives other than honest truth-seeking.

A stronger argument against Kavanaugh’s nomination is that we should not elevate to the Supreme Court a nominee over whom there will always be this dark pall of suspicion.

I’m sympathetic to this argument, too. If Kavanaugh were to step aside in exchange for a deal in which Donald Trump nominates conservative federal judge Amy Coney Barrett and Democrats agree to vote on her nomination before the midterms, the country might find a chance for compromise, closure, and even a moment of grace.

But that’s not likely to happen. And if suspicion based on allegation — even or especially “believable” allegations — becomes a sufficient basis for disqualification, it will create overpowering political incentives to discover, produce or manufacture allegations in the hopes that something sticks. Americans have a longstanding credulity problem — 9/11 trutherism; Obama birtherism; J.F.K. assassination theories; the “deep state” — so the ground is already fertile.

We should beware of what will grow in the Senate once this seed is sown. We should beware of what will happen in the country as cultural norms shift toward reflexively believing the accuser.

That’s especially because Blasey is a compelling, even emblematic, figure, and the fight against sexual assault a good and necessary cause. The history of civil-rights abuses is often connected to such causes. The McCarthyism of the 1950s sprang from well-grounded fears of communist espionage and Soviet intentions. The well-documented miscarriages of justice in campus sexual assault investigations are the outgrowth of an effort to stamp out a real problem.

The enduring challenge of liberal societies is to react to such challenges, not overreact. The guardrails against overreaction are based in the presumption of innocence and the legal, institutional and personal norms that bolster that presumption. To deny Kavanaugh’s confirmation based on Blasey’s allegation alone — never mind those of Deborah Ramirez or Julie Swetnick — is to remove one of the guardrails for all future nominees of whatever party.

Is that a good idea? More particularly, is it an idea for liberals to embrace, given that we live in an era in which a right-wing demagogue can mobilize millions of Americans to believe just about anything? When politics becomes solely a matter of “I believe” versus “I believe,” it descends into a raw contest for power. Historically, it’s been fascists, not liberals, who tend to win such contests.

It is surely appropriate that Americans should respond to Blasey’s obvious decency, compelling story, and confident memory with an open mind. But if Kavanaugh ends up winning confirmation, it will have much to do with the perception that Democrats never intended a fair process to begin with, toward either the nominee or his accuser; that they treated allegation as fact; and that they raised their sense of belief above normal standards of fair play. This may be the hill they want to die on. The rest of America should be careful not to follow.

Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. @BretStephensNYT•Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Believability Is the Road to National Ruin. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe